The chairman of Unocal, a huge international energy company based in
California, must soon make a hard and emblematic decision in the emerging field
of global-reputation management. The Taliban, the repressive Islamic militia
that controls nearly three-quarters of Afghanistan, has approved a deal with
Unocal to build a $5 billion oil-and-gas pipeline network through Afghanistan
that would connect the oil and gas fields of Central Asia to Pakistan and
India. For letting this oil and gas cross Afghanistan, Unocal would pay the Taliban $50 to $100 million annually, ranking the pipeline below only opium-smuggling as the Taliban's leading source of revenue. With this infusion the Taliban could move to consolidate its power, to conquer the anti-Taliban forces still occupying the north of Afghanistan, and to continue its medieval persecution of women and girls.

As recently as two years ago, before the Taliban captured the Afghan capital
of Kabul, half of Afghanistan's lawyers, doctors, and university students were
women. Today girls are forbidden to attend school, and women are forbidden to
work, to leave their homes without a male escort, and to wear shoes that make
noise -- an erotic incitement to the misogynist Taliban, which also requires
women to swathe themselves in form-hiding garments and veils. Twenty years of
war have decimated Afghanistan's male population, and so, without men to accompany
them, many women cannot leave their homes under any circumstances. Nor are they allowed to
see male doctors. Penalties for violating these prohibitions include whipping,
stoning, and, in some cases, death. As one might expect, suicide is increasing
alarmingly among Afghan women, according to the Feminist Majority Foundation.

Unocal says it won't go ahead with the pipeline unless the nations of the
world recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government. (Currently
only Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates recognize the Taliban
government; the rest of the world holds off, awaiting the results of the
ongoing civil war and hoping for an end to the Taliban's war against Afghan
women.) But the Taliban minister of mines and energy said recently that he
expects the project to start before the end of the year, and Unocal has given a
$900,000 grant to the University of Nebraska to train Afghan men to build the
pipeline.

None of this would have come to light if it were not for the women's rights
advocacy groups who, in an act of global solidarity with their sisters in
Afghanistan, have spoken out against the deal. Unocal, they say, must display
social responsibility and stay out of an Afghanistan that practices "gender
apartheid" toward women.

Doing the right thing would be painful for Unocal. Canceling the deal would
clear the way for an Argentinian company to build the pipeline, hurting the
stockholders toward whom Unocal has an overriding fiduciary responsibility. But
there are also costs for doing the wrong thing -- a crisis in global-reputation
management brought on by bad publicity, with incalculable consequences for
those same stockholders.

The lesson of this continuing episode is, I think, a heartening one that
reveals the good side of the new world economy. For just as the economy is
going global, so, through the agency of articulate groups, is the conscience of
humankind -- as Nike has learned (when the company was forced to change its
overseas work practices), as Unocal is learning now, and as the cigarette
companies may learn tomorrow. Helped by the transparency conferred by instant
communications, a global ethic is emerging apace with the global economy.
Truly, and for the first time in history, no woman is an island.